Many computing systems cache data in a caching mechanism to facilitate fast, efficient access to the data. Some computing systems may need to access data that is stored at a remote network-accessible storage system. For example, many organizations use virtual machines to perform application testing, often in the cloud. Because of various factors such as network latency, a remote storage system may be unable to facilitate direct access to data as quickly or efficiently as a local cache. In these situations, computing systems may implement a caching system that copies data from a remote storage system to a local cache in order to increase the speed at which the data may be subsequently accessed.
However in the above mentioned scenario, typical caching mechanisms generally do not increase the speed at which data is first accessed since the data must be copied from a remote storage system to a local cache. For at least this reason, some computing systems (e.g., application development and testing environments) that access large amounts of data during initialization phases of the computing systems and/or that infrequently access the same data during post-initialization phases of the computing systems may not see a significant difference between the speed at which data is accessed from a local cache and the speed at which data is accessed from a remote storage system. The instant disclosure, therefore, identifies and addresses a need for improved systems and methods for accelerating access to data.